Martin Weitzman: "'Extremists of that faith [the objection “If that would work, don’t you think we would have already tried it?”] act like the precocious but obsessive young surgeon who refuses to perform an appendectomy because he doesn’t understand why the appendix exists in the first place. The truth is that vestigial organs are present in economic systems as well as in biological ones–despite denials of the possibility based, in both cases, on vague or superficial generalities about Darwinian survival value. '"

"In effect, Daniel Drezner argues that equilibrium reasoning made everyone think someone else would cut Donald Trump down to size. But somebody has to do it, or it doesn’t get done. And in this case, it needed to be a critical mass of somebodies."